Nations and Empires that Grew on Genocide and Slavery

[Lilo]

"Diseased spleen defence"

The 'diseased-spleen defence' was a common plea used by the British to get away with the murder of Indians. https://t.co/tE9btdKJM5

[Lilo]

Children died of starvation in India whilst millions were spent celebrating Queen Victoria's 'Diamond Jubilee'



https://mobile.twitter.com/crimesofbrit ... 3141879809

[Varoon Shekhar]

Children died of starvation in India whilst millions were spent celebrating Queen Victoria's 'Diamond Jubilee'



https://mobile.twitter.com/crimesofbrit ... 3141879809

This is something Indians should bring up, when the question or 'criticism' "why is India testing missiles/exploding bombs/launching satellites/building expensive metro railways when people are poor and starving" is thrown at India.

Where were they when Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee was being celebrated? If the answer is "that was long ago", Indians can at least retort, "why isn't it mentioned, talked about and apologised for?"

[Lilo]

x-post

there is an interesting twitter handle that keeps rolling out the crimes of bartania around the world

https://twitter.com/crimesofbrits

it seems planes were used to machine gun mobs protesting against jallianwala bagh



could be 1857 or later

The canon pic looks like Kuka martys. Basically Namdhari sikhs protesting cow slaughter who were blown apart by british canons.

Punjab's Malerkotla memorial symbolises the violent divide over meat ban
That a staunch vegetarian community would kill butchers speaks of the emotive potential of this issue way back in the 1870s.



In Malerkotla, the only Muslim-dominated town in Indian Punjab, stands a three-dimensional 66-ft-tall memorial, which when viewed from all angles, looks like the Sikh khanda (double-edged sword). The difference though is that the 66-ft khanda has 66 gaping holes, with the size of the hole symbolising the age of the person blown by a cannon ball.

The story of this memorial is reflective of the divide that cow slaughter caused in the 19th century, and how the deep cut inflicted by the then rulers exacerbated existing fissures in the Indian society.

The story begins in 1871, when the then deputy commissioner of Amritsar sanctioned the opening of a slaughterhouse in the Holy City. While the sale of beef led to straining of relations between Muslims and non-Muslims, the Namdhari Sikhs (also known as Kukas), who are staunch vegetarians, rallied against this decision. In an action that would result in five Namdharis being sentenced to death, a group of followers raided the slaughter house, killed the butchers, and set the cows free. For this act, four Namdharis were hanged on 15 September, 1871.

The story does not end here. Four months later, when a Malerkotla judge ordered an ox to be butchered in front of a protesting Namdhari named Gurmukh Singh, a clash ensued. A band of 200 Namdharis proceeded towards Kotla to avenge the wrong, leading to 15 deaths including eight persons from Kotla, and seven of their own. Prompt action by the authorities and a judgement pronounced within a day of their arrest led to 66 of them being blown apart by cannon fire - now commemorated by the 66 holes in the 66-ft memorial.

The event has many legends embedded within. A man called Waryam Singh was too short for the cannonball to hit him. He is reported to have collected stones, created a mound and stood on top of the mound asking to be martyred. A 12-year boy Bishan Singh was being let off for being too young for capital punishment. On learning that he would be denied martyrdom, he rushed and assaulted British officials, and was immediately hacked to death.

A century and a half later, details of this story still continue to unravel, and these are very much a part of the idiom of the freedom struggle in Punjab. Their protest was as much reflective of their angst against cow slaughter, as it was a part of a wider movement against the British Empire, with the Kuka movement laying particular stress on boycott of British goods and services. It moved Shaheed Bhagat Singh, who in an article written in 1928, termed the Kuka movement as "a revolutionary transformative movement which made the first attempt for the independence of Punjab".

While the names of the Amritsar Namdharis were known to historians, those sentenced to death at Malerkotla remained anonymous till a dogged researcher Malwinder Singh Waraich unearthed the list and graciously shared them with me. That was in 2005, when I first reported the story here. Two years later, at the sesquicentennial anniversary of the Namdhari movement in 2007, the Punjab government acceded to a demand to create similar memorials in the hometowns of the Namdharis who were hanged in Amritsar.

That a staunch vegetarian community would kill butchers rather than allow cows to be slaughtered speaks of the emotive potential of this issue way back in the 1870s. That almost two centuries later, we are still reporting and discussing the story tells us that we have not come a long way since then.

[Philip]

Latest shocking revelations. The Allies knew all about the Nazis and their concentration camps a full two years before they "discovered" them unclassified docs now show. They did b*gger all to stop them,or warn the Germans,but secretly prepared war crimes cases.

Their policy was to let the Jews (and others) be slaughtered,as anti-Semitism was rife even amongst the so-called Allies,and when it was convenient to pin the blame on Hitler and the Nazis. To secretly watch and do nothing makes the Allies complicit in the Holocaust. Thus mere lip service was paid to the suffering Jews,gypsies,etc.,

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world ... 88036.html

Allied forces knew about Holocaust two years before discovery of concentration camps, secret documents reveal
Archive shows Adolf Hitler was indicted for war crimes in 1944

Andrew Buncombe New York

The Allied Powers prosecuted hundreds of Nazis for war crimes against Jewish people Wikipedia
The Allied Powers were aware of the scale of the Jewish Holocaust two-and-a-half years earlier than is generally assumed, and had even prepared war crimes indictments against Adolf Hitler and his top Nazi commanders.

Newly accessed material from the United Nations – not seen for around 70 years – shows that as early as December 1942, the US, UK and Soviet governments were aware that at least two million Jews had been murdered and a further five million were at risk of being killed, and were preparing charges. Despite this, the Allied Powers did very little to try and rescue or provide sanctuary to those in mortal danger.

Indeed, in March 1943, Viscount Cranborne, a minister in the war cabinet of Winston Churchill, said the Jews should not be considered a special case and that the British Empire was already too full of refugees to offer a safe haven to any more.

Several countries indicted Hitler and other senior Nazi leaders for war crimes (UNWCC)
“The major powers commented [on the mass murder of Jews] two-and-a-half years before it is generally assumed,” Dan Plesch, author of the newly published Human Rights After Hitler, told The Independent.

“It was assumed they learned this when they discovered the concentration camps, but they made this public comment in December 1942.”

Mr Plesch, a professor at the Centre for International Studies and Diplomacy at SOAS University of London, said the major powers began drawing up war crimes charges based on witness testimony smuggled from the camps and from the resistance movements in various countries occupied by the Nazis. Among his discoveries were documents indicting Hitler for war crimes dating from 1944.

In late December 1942, after the US, UK and others issued a public declaration about the Jewish slaughter, UK Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden told the British parliament: “The German authorities, not content with denying to persons of Jewish race in all the territories over which their barbarous rule extends, the most elementary human rights, are now carrying into effect Hitler’s oft-repeated intention to exterminate the Jewish people.”

Even Hitler didn't 'sink' to using chemical weapons like Assad has, Sean Spicer claims
Mr Plesch said that despite the collection of evidence and the prosecution of hundreds of Nazis – a judicial process that has been overshadowed by the trial of the Nazi leadership at Nuremberg – the Allied Powers did little to try and help those in peril. He said efforts by President Franklin D Roosevelt’s envoy to the United Nations War Crimes Commission (UNWCC), Herbert Pell, were pushed back by anti-semites in the US State Department.

Mr Pell would later claim that individuals within the State Department were concerned that America’s economic relationship with Germany after the war would be damaged if such prosecutions went ahead. After Mr Pell went public with the scandal, the State Department agreed to the prosecution of the Nazi leadership at Nuremberg, something that gathered pace after the highly publicised liberation of the concentration camps in the summer of 1945.

“Among the reason given by the US and British policy makers for curtailing prosecutions of Nazis was the understanding that at least some of them would be needed to rebuild Germany and confront Communism, which at the time was seen as a greater danger,” writes Mr Plesch.

Join us for the #booklaunch of Dr Dan Plesch's 'Human Rights After Hitler' (4 May): http://bit.ly/2oJ6ZCk @GUPress #humanrights
12:34 AM - 14 Apr 2017

Mr Plesch said the archive on which he based his research was closed to researchers for 70 years. Those wishing to read the UNWCC archive required the permission not only of the person’s own national government, but the UN Secretary General. Even then, researchers were for several years not permitted to make notes.

Former American ambassador to the UN Samantha Powers took the action that made the archive available.

Mr Plesch said the new material provided a further “cartload of nails to hammer into the coffins” of Holocaust denial – not that further evidence was required.

Yad Vashem, the Holocaust remembrance memorial in Israel, says on its website that “information regarding mass murders of Jews began to reach the free world soon after these actions began in the Soviet Union in late June 1941, and the volume of such reports increased with time”.

It refers to the December 1942 declaration condemning the extermination of Jewish people.

“Notwithstanding this, it remains unclear to what extent Allied and neutral leaders understood the full import of their information,” it adds. “The utter shock of senior Allied commanders who liberated camps at the end of the war may indicate that this understanding was not complete.”

More about: Adolf HitlerThe HolocaustNazisWar Crimes